


Welcome to the Machine

by Kleenexwoman



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-05
Updated: 2011-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:49:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kleenexwoman/pseuds/Kleenexwoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles and Erik take a short tour of New Amsterdam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome to the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following prompt:
> 
> "Because just imagining Erik's ability in a world that basically lives and breathes metal makes me nerd out."

Erik did not like Washington, D.C. The city had been planned and built by the Freemasons, and it showed not only in the occult designs that marked out the city's most important streets, but in the construction of the buildings themselves. Everything seemed to have been hewn out of flawless white marble, carved and polished within an inch of its life. It was an impressive feat of engineering and sculpture, but Erik had felt smothered, cut off by the stolid and unresponsive minerals.

He had been glad when Charles had decided to charter a private dirigible to ferry the other mutants from Washington to his ancestral home in Westchester. Although the ride was slow and Erik was impatient, he liked the structure of the dirigible very much. The long, curved steel bones of its balloon were a comforting presence around him, like a loose and warm embrace that never faltered. Erik spent most of his time within the bowels of the vessel, quietly touring its inner workings and boiler rooms, familiarizing himself with it.

He felt the city's presence even deep within the dirigible, felt it singing below his feet like an enormous choir, and rushed to the glassed-in observation deck. Charles and Raven and the children were already there, noses mostly pressed to the glass wall, Sean clinging nervously to the wrought-iron balustrade that was the only hint of nontransparency in the room.

Charles turned his head and smiled at Erik, beckoned him over. "New Amsterdam," he said, pointing. "Isn't it beautiful?"

The city was beautiful indeed, a sharp jet of gleaming obsidian jutting out from the green velvet of suburbs and farms into the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Erik thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. He had once flown over Novus Londinium on a dirigible as well, gotten to see the city and its loosely connected towns sprawled out across the English countryside like gleaming copper gears, but the city had been mostly stone, too, stone and wood, its history stolid and immovable beneath a veneer of progress. New Amsterdam _felt_ metal through and through, and it called to Erik.

Charles sidled close to Erik. "I suppose," he said into Erik's ear, "we could make a short detour for sightseeing."

*

The dirigible was greeted by the gigantic statue of the goddess Columbia that stood in the city's harbor, one hand raising a torch to light the way of friends and the other extending a sword to protect her city from foes. She gleamed in the sun, and Erik thought of taking control of the statue, making her step from her island and come to life.

Charles extracted a promise from Raven that she would keep the younger mutants together and scream mentally as loudly as she could if they got into trouble, and then took Erik's arm. "My mother used to take me here sometimes when I was a boy," he said. "It's a beautiful place, but not all of my memories of it are very happy. If it's all right...I'd like to see it through your eyes." They walked the streets for a while, not speaking, Erik drinking in the feel of the place, Charles's forefinger and middle finger touched ever so lightly to his forehead.

It was overwhelming, and Erik wanted to cry, to fall on his knees and worship the city. He could feel every piece of metal singing in the city, from the spires of skyscrapers as they reached towards the heavens to the groaning steel skeletons inside the buildings, from the copper pipes turning hot and cold with thousands of gallons of water to the miles and miles of copper wire thrumming with electricity. And he could feel everything under his feet, the electrified subway rails screaming with pleasure and the sewer pipes opening and shutting. He could feel the gears in the walls of every building turning constantly, constantly, the gears and wires and levels hidden underground and groaning and twisting in the dark.

At first it was mad, a melange of disconnected pieces madly whirling, and then it was a great conglomerate of everything happening at once, and Erik said that he had to sit down. Charles dragged him to Central Park, and they sat on an iron bench in the very center of the city while Erik caught his breath and Charles bought them both Italian ices and sausages in a bun and hot, strong java.

"Calm your mind," Charles said to him, and patted his shoulder and took a bite of his sausage. "It's rather a lot, isn't it? I have to be careful when I'm here, there are so very many people and so many of them are so very _loud_. Especially the mad ones. It's fascinating to feel what everyone is feeling, but I have to be careful--I have to do it by degrees. Stick one toe in first."

They lay on the grass and Erik closed his eyes and tried to feel the entire city again, slowly. He concentrated on one gear, at first--one huge, grinding gear that lay yards below his head, and he could feel the slowly rusting metal of the gear grinding away in the dark. The gear was part of a generator, and he followed the motion of the gear to levers that pumped gigantic whirling, sparking turbines, and then to a boiler that smoked red-hot with steam, and then to the pipes that piped in the water. Then he followed the pipes to a pump and the pump to more wires, and the wires led into a building and into a great elevator shaft, and there were more gears, each turning each other and then turning more gears in turn, huge metal boxes pumping up and down huge metal shafts in a symphony of metal.

It was beautiful, a million million gears turning in unison and a million million wires singing in unison, all for him, all so that the city could keep on going, so that the humans streaming in and out of doorways and buildings and through the streets could see by electric light and ride up and down into the sky, and none of them knew of the incredible concert beneath and all around them, the perfect workings of the city like an enormous clock or a windup toy.

He opened his eyes. "There is so much," he said, "so much," and he wiped away a tear.

*

Charles insisted that they keep moving after Erik had recovered. Now that Erik had the pulse of the city's workings, he began to notice the people, the odd and disconnected bits of metal that he had previously skimmed over in his quest to understand the clockwork of the city.

Some of the people they passed seemed to be wearing their own machines, not anything as normal as a watch or a radiophone unit, but whole devices that wrapped around them like a coat or woven into their clothes, tiny gears ticking away in circlets around them, machines that didn't appear to be doing anything visible. "High fashion," Charles said, and rolled his eyes. "It's terribly modern to have a clockwork corset or to be able to wind up your overcoat."

Charles stopped to drop a coin into a beggar's hat, and when the beggar reached into his hat to inspect the coin, the arm that emerged from the tattered blanket wrapped around the man was a metallic skeleton. Erik stared openly until Charles tugged him away, and Erik began to notice more and more prosthetics--rusty but functional pulley'd hands or jagged, jointed legs for the beggars and workingmen, and gleaming, intricately filigreed gold and silver jaws or breasts for the rich.

"I can't believe that this many rich people meet with all these accidents," he whispered to Charles, pointing out a woman, wrapped in furs and laughing, who had half of her face replaced with a cunningly-wrought copper alloy with a rather tacky gold overlay.

Charles frowned at the woman and touched his fingers to his forehead. "Well, _she_ has an excuse--her autobike's boiler blew when she was on it. But she does have four different faces, one for each season's fashions. Most of these are for fashion," he explained, "a way for the idle rich to show how clever they are--replacing parts of their aging, fallible bodies with something fashioned just for them that will never grow old."

As Charles spoke, Erik felt a hand creep along his backside. At first he thought it was Charles, and blushed, and was about to admonish Charles for his conduct in public. But Charles's left hand was in his, and his right hand was pressed to his forehead.

Erik whirled around to see a small figure scamper away through the crowd. His hand went to his back pocket--there was no wallet. Rather than give chase, his arm shot out, and he concentrated on the coins in his wallet. But there was something larger to grab onto, and in a moment there was a small, ragged, terrified urchin flying backwards through the streets of New Amsterdam, his arm up over his head, and his very nimble prosthetic steel fingers bent nearly backwards.

*

"You were kind to him," Charles said later.

Erik snorted. "Only because of you. You had to go and ask why his mother let him steal from strangers."

The boy had tried to look tough, insisting that he didn't have no mama and didn't care, but Charles had bent down and asked him earnestly whether his mother would like that he had chosen to steal. The boy had begun to sniffle, and Erik had let him go with a severe warning and a penny.

"It's an unavoidable consequence of the machines you like so much," Charles mused. "Some injuries are too severe for prosthetics. Machines don't stop if someone gets caught in the gears. They don't care. I don't blame him for not wanting to take her place at the machine."

Erik shuddered. "Please don't speak of it," he said.

"All right, then." They strolled down Broad Way for a while, the stars overhead blotted out by the brilliant lights of the city.

Erik's mind drifted away from the man at his side, and back to the man who had occupied his thoughts for the last fifteen years. Finding Shaw, losing him, meeting Charles...For a long time, he had felt his destiny ticking away like a machine, and sometimes the machine snagged or shuddered or the gears ground, but it had always kept going in the same pattern, leading towards the same end.

And now it seemed that the machine had expanded. More variables were being added, more people, more gears, and Erik no longer knew where he was going to end up and what was going to come out the other end. Erik wondered just who would be caught in the gears of the great workings of his fate. He squeezed Charles's hand, warm and soft and yielding and fleshy, and hoped that it would not be him.


End file.
